[JPL] Art that jazz: Hal Gaylor keeps playing with the greats

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Art that jazz: Hal Gaylor keeps playing with the greats

The names flow as effortlessly off his lips as his fingers once moved nimbly
over the strings of his bass.
Ask Hal Gaylor whom he played with and you get a hall of fame of singers and
jazz musicians: Miles Davis. John Coltrane. Stan Getz. Oscar Peterson.
Maynard Ferguson. Duke Ellington. Kai Winding. Chico Hamilton. Peggy Lee.
Billie Holliday. The Benny Goodman Septet. Count Basie. Mel Torme. Woody
Herman. Ornette Coleman. Cannonball Adderley. Clark Terry. Lena Horne. Frank
Sinatra. Tony Bennett.
The venues are just as storied: The Village Gate, the Blue Note, the Blue
Angel, Birdland.
To those who don't know him, it might sound like bragging. But Gaylor
doesn't talk about the music unless he's asked. Besides, if you've done it,
it's not bragging. And if you've done it and had it taken away from you, it
can be devastating.
THE MUSIC STOPPED FOR GAYLOR, who lives in Scotchtown, in 1973, when a virus
left him deaf in the right ear. He was 44 years old. He went to a doctor in
San Francisco because his ear was clogged. The doctor told him, "The cochlea
is dead." Tough news to hear for anyone; for a top jazz musician, a
professional death sentence.
Hal tried to keep playing, but "that was the beginning of the end." He
couldn't hear the music well enough to play at the level he had reached.
There are no half-measures backing up Tony Bennett.
"The louder it is, the harder it is for me to hear," Hal says. "The more
notes played, the more difficult to follow."
He sank into a depression: "I couldn't function for a while." He stopped
listening to music. It didn't help that, at the same time, the jazz scene
was changing. Swing and bebop, which had followed Dixieland, had given way
to fusion. The bass went from standup to electric. And jazz eventually
virtually disappeared. "It was the worst time of my life," he recalls.

A TIME TO REFOCUS. Hal and his wife, Evelyn, a former dancer, had moved to
Orange County to be close to New York City's music scene. Having studied
architecture as well as music at McGill University in Montreal, Hal designed
and built a modern house atop Mount Peter in Warwick. Eventually, he began a
new (and successful) career as a therapist and certified hypnotherapist for
addictive personalities.
"I seem to have a gift for it," says the man who turns out to have a lot of
gifts that may not be immediately apparent. The career change showed a
certain resilience and ability to move on, but even though he stopped
listening to music, his love for it and the memories of the days on the jazz
circuit never left him.
On June 28, 1994, he got a phone call that would lead him back to music
through another of his talents — drawing.
At the time, neither music nor art was uppermost in his mind. "I picked up
the phone and someone said, "Your liver is ready," Hal remembers. He quickly
got a cab to Stewart Airport and flew to Cleveland for a transplant. The
doctors sent him home to Warwick to recuperate, which meant, essentially,
not doing anything strenuous for a long time. That's when he turned to
drawing — or, more accurately, returned to it.
ALL THOSE DAYS AND NIGHTS on the road, in addition to his bass, Hal also
toted a sketchbook. When he wasn't playing, he was drawing, He sketched Tony
Bennett. Bennett, an accomplished artist in his own right, sketched Hal.
Rattling around his house on Mount Peter in 1994, Hal picked up a sketch
pad. Each page was a different color. He filled them in order as they came,
using colored pencils to depict scenes around the house. "Then I came to a
black page and said, 'What do I do?'"
What he did was get a couple of white pencils and find an old photo of
Bennett, which he sketched. Then he did a black-and-white sketch of Evelyn
on the beach (a sketch she never saw until recently). "It hit me like a
flash," he says. He went out and bought a bunch of black paper board with
texture. "Perfect for faces," he explains. Perfect for what he had in mind.
"I kept finding great pictures of performers, and when they were in the
spotlight. I knew that was the essence of them."

HAL HAS SINCE CAPTURED THE ESSENCE of nearly 50 jazz musicians in white
pencil on black paper board, portraits (some rather large) that are
remarkably accurate and evocative at the same time. Recently, a friend and
musician with whom he had played — and who had received a portrait of
himself from Hal as a gift — convinced him to haul his collection out of a
barn in Greenwood Lake and let the world see them. Hal admits that people's
reactions to his portraits are "like applause." And what, after all, are
musicians — even former musicians — without an audience and a spotlight?
If you Go ...
Hal's portraits are now on display at a private venue in Ulster County,
which is open to the public by appointment. Contact him through his Web
site, www.jazz-portraits.com, for details. The portraits will be on display
for several weeks, and Hal plans a mailing inviting Orange County artists to
the exhibit. The site contains all the portraits, their sizes and prices, as
well as his phone number and e-mail address. Yes, he also does T-shirts and
sweatshirts of the artists. For those who can't go to his site, Hal can be
reached at 350-0705 or via e-mail at HalG at Jazz-Portraits.com.
More
LEGENDARY
TALES
 Hal Gaylor's jazz journey began in Montreal, where he was born. His father
was a pop violinist who played with local bands. Hal, whose schoolmates
included Oscar Peterson and Maynard Ferguson, played the clarinet, but when
he applied to the McGill Conservatory of Music, they were loaded with
clarinetists but short of bass players. It turned out that Hal's big hands
were much more suited to the bass than the clarinet, so he switched and he
was a natural. He joined a small jazz group at McGill and off he went. His
music career is full of memories involving famous names:
 When Frank Sinatra, in his pre-"From Here to Eternity" doldrums, played a
gig in Montreal, he finished a set with the band signed to accompany him and
said, "Where'd they get that band, in the Yellow Pages? I dare you to do
that again." Then he invited Hal and his small jazz group, which had played
earlier, to finish the engagement with him. Hal recalls Sinatra being
invited out to the alley for making those remarks. He also remembers Sinatra
visiting a VA hospital wearing blue alligator shoes sent to him by Ava
Gardner, who was filming "The Snows of Kilimanjaro" in Africa at the time.
 One time in Buffalo, Hal was with a group backing up Mel Torme. A gangster
type was putting the moves, rather loudly, on women at the bar. Hal asked
him to tone it down. The guy responded by pulling a gun out of his belt and
saying, "When you come down here, I'm gonna take care of you." Fortunately,
for Hal, the ever-smooth Torme soothed the non-music lover.
 Hal was part of a trio that toured with Tony Bennett for six years. "It was
off the circuit," Hal says, "but we got a regular salary." Bennett and
company also often appeared with big bands. Like Count Basie's. The bands,
of course, had to play Bennett's signature song, "I Left My Heart in San
Francisco, " but Basie didn't know the introductory verse to the song: "The
loveliness of Paris seems somehow sadly gay "¦" Hal taught it to him.
 The "happiest, most beloved guy" on the circuit: saxophonist Zoot Sims.
 The most miserable: Benny Goodman. The great clarinetist had "an ego the
size of the concert hall," according to Hal. "He was a strange man," who
"brought no joy to the surroundings except when he played with his band."
"He regarded himself as 'the king.'" He was also cheap, despite marrying
into millions. Hitching a ride with his musicians back to New York City from
an engagement in Connecticut, Goodman didn't offer to pay for the tolls,
much less the gas.
 Having been escorted out of Mexico by the police (a contract disagreement),
Hal and his trio were stranded in El Paso before finally winding up in Los
Angeles. They got a New Year's Eve gig at the home of TV's biggest stars at
the time, Lucille Ball and Desi Arnaz, who turned out to be unassuming
hosts. A charming Lucy answered the door, and when Hal's piano player got
sick and threw up all over the white angora rug in the bathroom (there was
white angora everywhere), Desi helped clean him up, and got paid for his
medical attention "¦ and then sat in at the piano for the evening.
 In addition ... Hal also used his architecture training to design a new
Linden House in Greenwood Lake after the restaurant/hotel burned down. Hal's
wife's father owned the village landmark. Hal also designed the original
Orange County Choppers logo for their T-shirts.